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How afraid should we be of Islamic State?

ISIS is a massive threat but one primarily directed at the place where it does almost all of its killing — the Middle East. An analysis by the Star’s Mitch Potter.

Islamic State fighters drive a commandeered vehicle through Mosul, Iraq, last June. While powerful, the movement is beset by contradictions, notes author Janice Gross Stein. (The Associated Press file photo)

"Make no mistake: by fighting this enemy here you are protecting Canadians at home," Prime Minister Stephen Harper told troops during a visit to Iraq with Defence Minister Jason Kenney last week. (Sean Kilpatrick / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

Demonstrators chant pro-Islamic State slogans in front of the Iraqi provincial government headquarters in Mosul last year. Many analysts see the regional hostilities as part of a war within Islam. (The Associated Press file photo)

Men in a village south of Cairo mourn over Egyptian Coptic Christians who were captured in Libya and killed by militants affiliated with the Islamic State group in February. (Hassan Ammar / The Associated Press file photo)

Islamic State attacks and kidnappings have led to hundreds of deaths and disappearances among Iraq's Yazidi minority. Here, women wait after arriving at a medical centre northeast of Kirkuk in April. (SAFIN HAMED / AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

The odds, now more than ever, favour longevity: Canadians living out their lives longer, if not better, than our ancestors would have dared dream.

But if something should cut short your 21st-century world, chances are it would be one of the country’s 10 deadliest threats — cancer, heart disease, stroke, respiratory disease, accidents, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, influenza and pneumonia, suicide, or kidney disease. Combined, they claim a quarter-million Canadians each year.

What almost certainly won’t kill us is what we fear most: terrorism. And we don’t hear that rather salient fact nearly often enough.

Even in the age of ISIS, the average Canadian is likelier to die in a bathtub — or win the lottery — than to fall victim to a Charlie Hebdo-style massacre.

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We lost two soldiers last October in outrageous strikes that seized headlines for weeks. Inexcusable violations of Canada’s beloved normal. We reeled. And we endured.

Two. Repeat. Two. Terrible, yes. Also, two.

Yet the threat exists, as we were reminded this week. Again and again. There was Prime Minister Stephen Harper, capping a lightning visit to Canadian soldiers in Iraq and Kuwait with lavish praise for the war against those who would “despoil our home and native land.

“Make no mistake: by fighting this enemy here you are protecting Canadians at home,” said Prime Minister Stephen Harper on his trip to Iraq. (The Canadian Press)

“Make no mistake: by fighting this enemy here you are protecting Canadians at home,” the prime minister said. “Because this evil knows no borders, and left uncontained, it will spread like a plague.”

“It’s a sobering observation to make, and there is no euphemistic way of making it,” wrote Michel Coulombe, chief of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), in his annual report to Parliament.

“There was a period after 9/11 when many people assumed that an effective terrorist attack was necessarily one that involved a network of highly trained operatives bent on committing a spectacular mass-casualty event,” wrote Coulombe.

“In truth, a single assailant with low-tech weaponry — a rifle or even a car — can bring tragedy and insecurity to our communities.”

Thursday brought the lone incongruous note in an amped-up week of fear and loathing as a remarkably sanguine Omar Khadr emerged a free man against the last of the Harper government’s furious objections. Once the child of Al Qaeda, and now, in his first ever words to Canadians, a man of seemingly gentle gratitude, intent upon nothing more than building a new life dedicated to healing others.

“I’m going to have to disappoint him,” Khadr told reporters when asked if he had any comment for the prime minister. “I’m not the person he thinks I am.”

Amid the pounding drums of fear, some hear the hidden pulse of the coming fall election. A government that seemed, before November, to be veering rapidly toward its best-before date now has a spring in its terror-fighting step. Resolute, focused, more than willing to lead the campaign against ISIS, over there and right here at home.

Demonstrators chant pro-Islamic State slogans in front of the Iraqi provincial government headquarters in Mosul in June. Many analysts see the regional hostilities as part of a war within Islam. (The Associated Press file photo)

But set aside your politics, if only for a moment, and ponder the fear itself — and how it rankles and confounds a growing number of security researchers, who are gradually learning to downsize the actual threat the Islamic State (a.k.a. ISIS and various other abbreviations) represents to Canada. And learning also that this is not a fight we should so much as dare lead, lest we give the Islamic State militants precisely what they want.

The Islamic State is a massive threat but one primarily directed at the place where it does almost all of its killing — the Middle East. Many now regard the overlapping regional hostilities not as a war with Islam, but a war within Islam. Moreover, a war that the Middle East must lead, fight and finish.

ISIS is secondarily a threat to Europe, by dint of the thousands of Europeans — Muslims or converts to Islam — who have abandoned their lives to join the rump caliphate that spans Iraq and Syria.

Next, and tangentially, the Islamic State is a threat to other parts of the West, including Canada, on two fronts: the risk of battle-hardened Canadian ISIS fighters returning from the war with training and intent to do harm, domestically; and the risk that so-called “lone fighters” will answer the ISIS call to arise and attack from within.

Yet even here, some researchers doubt those risks match up with the warnings, given that the number of Canadians known to have joined ISIS is barely enough to mount a decent hockey game.

“The Islamic State is a threat to Canada — but it is wildly overblown,” says Amarnath Amarasingam, a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada postdoctoral fellow who co-directs a study of Canadian foreign fighters at the University of Waterloo.

“By our count, there are about 60 Canadians who went to fight, of which 15 are already dead. And not all are with the Islamic State — some are fighting for the Kurds, some are fighting for the Free Syrian Army, for nationalist reasons, not as global jihadists who would present a threat to Canada.”

A similar low-threat assessment for Europe emerged this week in a research paper for Holland’s Clingendael Institute of International Relations, which concluded that, “although concerns have run high following the recent attacks in Paris, the threat of violence carried out by foreign fighters to Europe, while present, is largely overstated.”

Men in a village south of Cairo mourn over Egyptian Coptic Christians who were captured in Libya and killed by militants affiliated with the Islamic State group in February. (The Associated Press file photo)

Co-author Daniel Byman, a professor of security studies at Georgetown University, goes further in his assessment, emphasizing that while Europe must provide “ongoing resources to security and intelligence services to keep the threat low,” it should also “avoid reactive policies such as systematic prosecution and imprisonment of returnees.

“Some returnees must be imprisoned immediately and others monitored, but governments should also channel resources towards community-led programs emphasizing the rehabilitation and reintegration of returned fighters,” Byman writes.

In the Canadian context, it is difficult to imagine the general public embracing such a nuanced approach when the government itself, with more than a little help from the media, is sounding the direst of warnings. But that too is addressed in the Clingendael recommendations, which urge governments to “take care not to overstate the threat of foreign fighters and take steps to reassure citizens that the risk is real but limited.”

To the University of Waterloo’s Amarasingam, that’s the missing piece in Ottawa’s approach to the problem: we get all the warnings, minus the reassurance.

“I understand what the government and CSIS and the RCMP are trying to do,” says Amarasingam. “They want to ensure that in the unlikely event that Canada ever experiences an attack like 9/11, it won’t tear apart the fabric of our society and have us turn on each other.

“They want to plant the seed of possibility in our consciousness to prepare us. But when you raise those warnings — when you say ‘We’re not a multicultural haven immune from this; we are at risk’ — you also need to temper that message and provide the context that the risk of that kind of attack on the streets of Toronto is actually quite low.

“That’s a key piece that Canadians aren’t getting. And the consequence is that the fear is ramped up out of proportion to the actual risk.”

The same disproportionate fear extends to the issue of so-called “lone wolf” attacks. Lone wolves, researchers now are finding, are not so alone after all.

In a recent study on lone-actor terrorism, Prof. Paul Gill of University College London found that nearly half of the case studies involved terrorists who regularly engaged in a “detectable range of activities” within wider peer groups. Some interacted face to face with co-ideologues, while 38 per cent interacted virtually; 35 per cent attempted to recruit others.

“What we are learning about these so-called lone actors makes us realize that much of the fear in circulation is based on utter nonsense,” says Amarasingam.

“It’s the unknowability that freaks people out. When you have fear without context, some people feel like they can’t trust anyone. Some think any Muslim in their community is a potential threat, based on the view that ‘It could be anyone.’

“But of course it can’t be just anyone. Now that we’re learning more about the process of radicalization, we’re beginning to understand that it comes with a need to shout from the rooftop their intentions. Some write manifestos, others record selfie videos. They have to make a splash and along the way they often tell people — and quite often that gets detected.”

Still frightened? OK, you should be — but just a little bit. Perhaps another way to find perspective in the absence of official reassurance are the words of renowned Canadian scholar Janice Gross Stein, who goes deep to explain the Islamic State in a chapter for a new compendium by the Transatlantic Academy titled Faith, Freedom and Foreign Policy.

Stein’s essay — “The Islamic State and the West: The Politics of Purification” — holds that despite the “brutal violence, genocidal killing, beheadings, the destruction of historic works of art and the enslavement of women,” there is actually nothing especially new about ISIS.

Tracing the theological roots of the Islamic State from the 18th-century House of Saud to late-20th-century Al Qaeda, Stein argues that while prior militant and millenarian movements shared many of the same distinguishing characteristics, the Islamic State’s “sophistication with the tools of the digital era elevates threat perceptions.

“I suggest that in the non-Muslim world, the threat of the Islamic State is exaggerated,” she writes. The movement “struggles with its own contradictions, as is already apparent, and it is unlikely to have the strength and resilience to overcome these contradictions and adapt to changing conditions.”

Islamic State attacks and kidnappings have led to hundreds of deaths and disappearances among Iraq's Yazidi minority. Here, women wait after arriving at a medical centre northeast of Kirkuk in April. (AFP/Getty Images)

The impulse for purification — a return to the roots of religion in the face of foreign influence — is part of not just Islam but also the histories of Judaism, Christianity and Hinduism, she notes.

But such movements gain vigour “when the material world appears to fail to fulfil its promise” — and nowhere has that promise failed more completely than in the corruption-plagued Middle East, where the angry young populations have turned not only against their own governments but also against “the infidel West, that has sustained and supported these authoritarian governments and stood by while they crushed dissent.”

Yet ISIS, in not merely seizing territory but proclaiming itself “a caliphate, with the attendant sweeping claims to religious and political authority over righteous Muslims everywhere,” has made enemies within Islam in ways that Al Qaeda never did.

“Those claims pose no direct threat to western governments, however, nor does (the Islamic State) have the West front and centre in its sights,” writes Stein. Yet the West’s response, she notes, has involved “a very dangerous dance in democratic societies,” including expanded surveillance and intervention tools that have generally not been accompanied by any increase in civilian and legislative oversight.

Stein points to a long road ahead. In facing the limited domestic threat, western countries, whatever path they choose, must “deepen civility, respect and the commitment to inclusive and shared citizenship.”

And on a military front, while ISIS must be contained, the eventual ground attack must “must be led by those who live next door.” Any all-out assault by western forces “would fulfil the most violent apocalyptic fantasies” of ISIS leaders.

“Over time, this story is mildly optimistic … our own history confirms that the puritans cannot remain puritanical forever,” concludes Stein.

But in the meantime, a struggle that could last generations will require the West simply to “endure, with resolve, stoicism, patience and intelligence,” mindful that the primary victims in the ISIS crisis are “the hundreds of millions of believing Muslims whose voices are drowned out by this quarrel, the millions who have been made refugees from their homes, and the hundreds of thousands who have lost their lives.”

We can commit to contain, and to prevent the spread of the brutal ISIS impulse. But let us not lead, she says.

“Our best protection from the flying debris is the use of our intelligence assets in ways that are compatible with our basic values, the deepening of our open and inclusive societies, and a long view of history.”

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